OnePhatMan

Three weight-lifting workouts in and I’m torn.

On the one hand, it’s wonderful: my shoulder remains pain-free, and once I got over the initial crippling “my muscles haven’t been worked like this in months” pain last week, I’ve felt really good. My strength is coming back, growing from workout to workout, and I love falling back into my old workout patterns.

I really missed lifting.

Even better, muscles I haven’t seen in a while are showing up again. My biceps are noticeably bigger, as are my quads and pecs. Not that I’m already gaining muscle again; it’s too soon for that. I’m getting pumped up with water as my muscles work to repair the damage I’ve done during my lifting sessions.

And therein lies the rub.

I’ve packed on six pounds of water in the last week, which means what I was afraid of turned out to be true. Though I picked up fifteen pounds on the scale after my accident and surgery, in reality I gained a little more than that because I dropped a few pounds of water weight from not lifting. No wonder I felt so soft and flabby.

How do I know the six pounds is water? Simple. It can’t be anything else. My eating is the same, but my workouts have increased with the addition of weightlifting, and my body is responding to that. I’ve revised the numbers in the upper left corner to reflect the new information.

Don’t get me wrong—it’s not a problem, it’s just that I had further to go than I originally thought. It’s not like I don’t know how to do it, though. And I’ll take the extra few pounds of effort just for being able to lift weights again.

So it turns out that painting a room, with all the up-and-down work on the ladder, isn’t conducive to the healing of a shin splint. Just when I thought the pain was getting better, I repainted a bedroom in our house over the weekend, and the pain came back with a vengeance.

I guess I’ll take a couple of weeks off the walking so it gets completely healed, and try my old routine of 3 days of weights, 3 days of the elliptical until my leg is back to normal.

Getting old is a bitch.

America is the land of instant gratification. From pizzas delivered in 30 minutes to packages delivered anywhere in the country overnight, we’ve come to expect that we can get whatever we want right now. Matter of fact, our sense of entitlement to instant gratification is so great that we get ticked off if we don’t get it.

We’re annoyed when we have to wait five minutes for a Big Mac. We seethe when the movie store doesn’t have the latest movie in and we have to wait a day. We get frothy flecks of spittle at the corner of our mouths when we’re on hold for more than one Muzak song.

It’s no wonder the diet industry is so big. They try to cash in on our desires for instant gratification. And they do, to the tune of 30+ billion dollars a year. How many ads have you seen promising you can lose ten pounds in 48 hours? How many products have you bought expecting to get six-pack abs in four minutes a day? How many people do you know who’ve gone for “thermal wraps” so they can take fifteen inches off their waist in a matter of minutes?

They’re counting on you to be a sheep. Don’t be one.

Lasting change to your body takes time and effort. You didn’t get to whatever point you’re at now overnight, and you’re not going to turn into a fitness model overnight either. Be patient. Enjoy the ride. Expect the occasional setback. It’s all part of the wonderful thing we call “life.”

Patience isn’t called a virtue for nothing. Here’s what a few well-known people had to say about it:

Everything comes gradually and at its appointed hour. - Ovid

He that can have patience can have what he will. - Benjamin Franklin (happy 300th birthday today, Mr. Franklin)

Patience is the companion of wisdom. - St. Augustine

All human wisdom is summed up in two words - wait and hope. - Alexandre Dumas